Dynamic Characters (9 page)

Perhaps he says, ''Can I see you tonight?'' in a weary tone of voice, while watching another woman cross the street, with the corners of his mouth turned down. or perhaps he says it intently, his eyes on Sue's face, his whole body yearning forward. Each sentence will convey entirely different meanings to Sue, despite identical words.

In fiction, dialogue doesn't have the powerful support of these nonverbal clues. You can, of course, describe some of them: Harry's gestures, Sue's tone of voice. And you should. But you may also need to increase the emotional level of the words themselves, to compensate for the loss of nonverbal communication.

For instance, suppose a character named Stan has just learned of another character's death. If you were a playwright, you could write Stan's line as ''Tom was a good man.'' The actor would supply the emotion with which the line should be said: resignation, irony, anger. But we fiction writers don't have John Malkovich or Meryl Streep to lend color to our prose. We have to do it ourselves. Therefore, you might heighten Stan's dialogue to ''Tom was a good man. Damn it, he was such a good man!'' The extra words, the mild profanity, the exclamation point—all make clear that Stan's emotion is anger that this good man is dead.

You might also use both heightened dialogue
and
description of nonverbal cues:

''Tom was a good man,'' Stan said softly. He fumbled with a cigarette, lit it, dropped it on the carpet. And then, ''Damn it, he was such a good man!'' He looked out the window, dry-eyed, and the rug smoldered at his feet.

Here, dialogue that might seem theatrical in real life combines with distraught action to add layers of emotion to the little speech.

YOU WEREN'T LIKE THAT YESTERDAY: CONSISTENCY IN DIALOGUE

This is a tricky subject. Yes, you want your character to speak consistently from one page to the next. A teenage girl who says, ''So I go, 'He didn't tell me that!' I was, like, totally grossed out,'' is not the same teenage girl who says, ''I respond to the alienation in the novels of Camus.'' If you try to make her the same girl, we probably won't believe it.

on the other hand, everyone has more than one mode of speech. You undoubtedly use different language and sentence structures to your best friend, your six-year-old niece and the cop who has just stopped you for speeding. Good dialogue should capture this difference—while
still
sounding like the same person.

An example. Two characters are having an amiable discussion about where to have lunch. They decide, walk down the street to the restaurant, and one ducks briefly inside the post office to buy stamps. The other, waiting outside, is suddenly lunged at by a mugger who kicks him in the kneecap and grabs his wallet. The character falls to the ground, scraping his left hand and right palm. He no longer sounds amiable. In fact, he yells something unprintable in this book.

Has the dialogue become inconsistent? It doesn't match the previous diction or sentence structure. But it does match the new circumstances. Furthermore, it's still recognizable as something that a basically amiable person would say, in that it doesn't employ racial epithets, or go on for pages of invective, or lapse into Victorian epithets or outdated slang or threats of retaliation—none of which would have been in keeping with what we'd already been shown of the character.

In short,
consistency
is another one of those partly-true, partly-not statements about writing. Make your dialogue consistent—but not so unvarying that it ignores specific circumstances.

YOU'RE FROM THE SOUTH, AREN'T YOU: THE DANGERS AND DELIGHTS OF DIALECT

This aspect of fiction has both literary and political connotations. Consider the following uses of dialect:

• You 'ave it, guv'nor!

• Sho' will, massa, suh!

• At your service, old chap!

• Faith and begorra, but yer right, me fine lad!

• That's-a the way, paisano!

• Rike you rike it, A-san!

^•
 Sa vah kum sa vah, sir!

None of those dialects are convincing, all of them are hackneyed, a few of them are offensive, and the last one is incomprehensible: a good catalogue of the pitfalls of using dialect.

So does that mean a writer should avoid dialect completely?

No. Just write it carefully. The goal is to capture the
feel
of nonstan-dard English by judicious variations of diction, word order, spelling and sentence rhythm, and by moderate use of common phrases. This works better than wholesale and probably stereotypical distortion of language. Here's a good example, from Eudora Welty's ''old Mr. Marblehall'':

''I declare I told Mr. Bird to go on to bed, and look at him! I don't understand him! . . . After I get Mr. Bird to bed, what does he do then? He lies there stretched out with his clothes on and don't have one word to say! Know what he does? ... He might just as well not have a family.''

Can you hear the regional flavor, definite but not overdone? The guideline here is that a little dialect goes a long way. It should suggest regional speech, not bludgeon us with it.

Dialect has another use, as well. Simple or very young characters may have only one mode of speech, the one with which they grew up. Older or more sophisticated people, however, frequently retain the ability to speak in their native dialect but also acquire the ''standard'' American network-news-anchor speech. Such a person can choose which speech he wishes to use when—and those choices alone may say something about him.

He may, for instance, deliberately pile on exaggerations of his own dialect to confuse, embarrass or otherwise gain psychological advantage over his listeners. Here, for instance, is Bruce Sterling's Grena-dian character Winston Stubbs, from the novel
islands in the Net.
Stubbs is perfectly capable of standard business English, and he uses it when he wishes. In the following speech, however, he's making sure that his listeners, Laura and David Webster, know that Stubbs's culture and beliefs are radically different from those of everybody else at an international banking conference:

Laura had become seriously worried. She greeted them in the front lobby. ''So glad to see you. Was there any trouble?'' ''Nuh,'' said Winston Stubbs, exposing his dentures in a sunny smile. ''I-and-I were downtown, seen. Up-the-island. . . . We could use a public relations,'' Stubbs said, grinning crookedly at Laura. ''I-and-I's reputation could use an upgrade. Pressure come down on I-and-I. From Babylon Luddites.''

Even if you know that in island patois
i-and-i
means
we
and that
seen
is the equivalent of
you see,
this dialect feels foreign and striking. Laura and David are put on notice that Stubbs and his bank operate by different rules—which is just what Stubbs intends. He exploits his own awareness of his own dialect for his own purposes.

Everything that applies to dialect, incidentally, also applies to accents. ''Those are your papers of identification, isn't it?'' is preferable to the fake French of ''Zat ees yourrr papeeyas of. . . how you say it? Bah! . ..
l'identification, n'est-ce pas?"
Only the staunchest reader will stick with you through pages of that stuff.

SHE JUST GOES ON AND ON: HOW MUCH DIALOGUE DO YOU NEED TO CHARACTERIZE SOMEONE?

It depends. Whom are you characterizing?

You can reveal character not only through what a person says, but through how much they say. Does your protagonist hoard words as if they were gold pieces? Does she have verbal diarrhea? or is she somewhere in between?

The taciturn character can come across as ''the strong silent type,'' or as uninterested in communicating with other people, or as in a very bad mood. Let us know which is correct through the content of the dialogue. In other words, quality and quantity should work together to characterize. Is this guy Gary Cooper, or is he James L. Page in John Gardner's
October Light,
who ''was never a great talker—not like
her,
she'd lecture your arm off''
(her
is James's sister).

Similarly, volatility can indicate nervousness, self-centeredness or just high spirits. Is your great talker like Miss Bates, Jane Austen's spinster lady in
Emma,
who can rattle on for entire content-free pages, out of sheer pleasure in having company? or is she more like Anne Tyler's Muriel
(The Accidental Tourist)
who also overwhelms her listeners with a flood of talk, but because she's so desperate to make human connections? or is your talker like W. Somerset Maugham's Hayward
(Of Human Bondage),
who gives his opinions on and
on
because in his heart he believes he's the only one who possesses any valid opinions?

Let us know.

THE LAST WORD, ALMOST

Writing dialogue is a balancing act. Dialogue that characterizes is artificially informative—but not implausibly so. It indicates background—unless the character is trying not to do so. It's consistently interesting—except for the occasional brief break to discuss mundane topics that establish verisimilitude. It's emotional and individual—but not so much of either that it becomes parody. How do you learn this balancing act? The same way you learn everything else about writing—through reading authors you admire, and through practice. Write a lot of dialogue. Read it aloud. See how it sounds to you and to other people whose ear you trust. Rewrite it. Write some more.

And as if it weren't enough to concentrate on the content of a character's speech, you also need to think about its presentation. More on that in the next chapter. Meanwhile, the last word on using dialogue to characterize comes from a master of the art, Mark Twain:

When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the circumstances, and have a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

SUMMARY: USING DIALOGUE TO CHARACTERIZE

• Rather than telling us what your characters are like, let them reveal themselves through what they say about their own tastes, hopes, dreams, prejudices, goals and worldviews, and their view of the other characters in the novel.

• Supplement dialogue with punctuation and narrative to fill in nonverbal clues.

• Make your characters speak consistently—but don't be rigid about it. Everyone alters his speech for different audiences and circumstances.

• Use dialect and accents with a light hand.

• Remember that how much your character speaks works along with the content of his speech to create a definite impression in readers' minds.

Good dialogue, everyone agrees, seems natural. Note the verb: It
seems
natural. But, in fact, it's not.

Consider great beauty. The Parthenon, perhaps. Or Sophia Loren. Or Babe Ruth hitting a high sweet curving home run. You know best what you consider heart-stirringly and memorably beautiful. Whatever it is, it probably looks completely natural: perfectly proportioned, radiantly curved, a gift of nature (that's the Parthenon I'm talking about, not Loren). And, almost certainly, it is not.

In art, the completely natural seldom works. Instead nature is refined, trained, pruned, heightened, unspontaneously considered and rehearsed. The perfect building, the liquid aria, the gorgeous football play—these are carefully composed. Choices are made, adjustments are constant, training counts. The results may look natural, but they are in fact artificial, which is itself a term derived from
art.

Dialogue is like that, too. Writing dialogue that sounds natural is the result of artifice. Even though we talk all day, good dialogue is more than talk written down. In fact, it differs from real speech in several important ways.

TIGHT AND CLEAN: